Lighting the path to a worser future!

Well, I just spent fifteen bucks on 24 100 watt incandescent light bulbs.

But it isn’t enough to buy light bulbs without pointing the finger at the corporate fascists who have reduced me to it. Perhaps “corporate fascist” is too strong a term. Perhaps I should call them “crony capitalists.” Anyway, I found the grim details in a grim post Glenn linked earlier titled “The End of The Light Bulb as We Know It.”

No sooner had the Republican Congress announced it would vote to repeal the 2007 law this past July, than the light bulb lobby swooped in to protect themanufacturers’ interests — not, of course, those of the incandescent bulb-loving public:

[The] manufacturers … had begun producing the new bulbs, and feared the rollback of the standards would undermine their investments in developing energy-efficient bulbs. Bulb-maker Philips began an aggressive lobbying campaign, meeting with lawmakers and staffers on Capitol Hill, urging them not to roll back the light bulb law. They brought along samples of the new bulbs, similar in appearance to the old bulb.

No member of Congress should have been fooled.

The Senate voted against the repeal, and Obama would have vetoed a repeal, but the manufacturers’ heated lobbying was not in the public interest — of course.

Bastards.

What I’d like to see is some competition. You know, in what was once known as the free market.

It’s bad enough when busybodies want to tell us what’s good for us, but when they get the power to do it, and the big, too-big-to-fail companies see that there’s money to be made by falling in lockstep behind them, ordinary consumer choices are toast. The result is that perfectly good consumer goods are replaced by government-mandated, poor-quality schlock that does not work, but which we have no choice but to buy.

I’d say that government is the problem, but you already knew that.